Many businesses today are dealing with both economic and resource strain — be it rising costs, resource shortages, skill shortages or one of the many other leading issues. Companies are looking to increase their use of technology to be more competitive in the marketplace. One of the promising paths to mitigating the negative effects of resource strain and becoming more competitive is modernization and cloud-based technology. I don’t just mean modernization in the form of using the latest technology, but operating that technology in a modern way utilizing DevOps best practices.
According to AWS, “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity.” Here are five examples of how cloud computing enables DevOps best practices which can significantly reduce resource strain.
1. Automate Repetitive Tasks
One of the most important benefits of cloud computing vs. on-premises is an increased ability to reduce toil through automation. With the cloud there are more tools (both built-in and third-party) aimed at automating everything. The goal is to automate as much as possible and always be increasing automation — starting with the most mundane, repetitive tasks to free up resources for problem-solving, adding value, and finding ways to improve. In fact, many schools of thought in DevOps encourage dedicating an ample amount of time to find ways to improve and further reduce that strain. The time spent will lead to increased efficiency down the line.
One way to achieve this is to invest in infrastructure as code tooling.Each cloud offers their own approaches, tooling, development kits, and methodologies, but there are also cloud-agnostic third-party tools like Terraform and Pulumi that can assist.
2. Reduce Administrative Burden
One of the biggest problems businesses face in a post-pandemic world is a labor shortage. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 11 million jobs have been consistently vacant in the U.S. over the past year. Cloud technology requires less effort to manage infrastructure, contributing to cloud computing ROI.
In the cloud, there is a shared responsibility model, that helps illustrate who is responsible for keeping what parts of the environment/resources maintained and up-to-date. In multiple cases the responsibility resides with the cloud vendor which can often reduce administrative burden on in-house resources to be allocated to to more value-add tasks. Some examples of cloud tooling that can help reduce burden include:
c. AWS Config
3. Access To Resources That Provide Security
Cloud computing also offers easier access to many more resources at the click of a button. Through the right process and with the right tools and workflow, companies can allow developers to create their own resources with corporate and security policies pre-applied to prevent unnecessary risk. These automatic security measures can even apply to the storage and encryption of sensitive data.
Automated security and policy enforcement can also be built into different policies and templates that can be created and published for developers to use. This helps tremendously with the continued increase in the importance of security and consistency. Each cloud provider, as well as different U.S government publications, provide minimum settings as well as recommendations.
4. Scale Your Business
Everybody wants to grow their business, but old technology stunts scalability. One of the main benefits of cloud vs on-premises is the ability for operations teams to configure most resources to automatically scale up and down according to metrics and demand without any intervention. This helps ensure you are only running the resources you need at any given time. The cloud can add more resources during high demand and remove some during periods of reduced demand. This is especially useful for seasonal businesses, which can have high demand one quarter and low demand the next.
With the cloud, you can pay for as much or as little cloud resources as you need. Keeping in mind that while some cloud resources are charged based on consumption and use, there are other resources that you have to pay for whether they are used or not.
5. Increase Insights
Finally, all cloud providers offer multiple “out of the box,” easy-to-plug-in tool sets to unlock advanced insights, logs, and telemetry into the operations, health, and performance of your applications and infrastructure. This increases your level of insight into how your environment is functioning as well as provide insight on historical data and trends. Many tools are also available in the same way to show you the overall security of your environment and application. Having this level of information in an intuitive visual interface makes it easier to be proactive in monitoring, supporting, and protecting your company’s critical infrastructure and data.
It also lessens the time and resources spent on installing, configuring, and building these tools. That time is better spent improving or maintaining the applications themselves as well as preventing issues.
Getting Started in the Cloud
Business expenses continue to rise, and budgets are tightening as the cost of everything from raw resources to labor increases. Without proper support from the company and ensuring that resources are prepared to take on new technologies and ways of doing things at a reasonable pace, cognitive overload may result leading to mistakes and burnout. Cloud computing is the answer many are finding, because of its ability to automate everything, reduce administrative tasks, provide immediate access to resources, scale the business, and deliver insights and increased security.